AI is not the problem. You are.
A slightly ranty defence of the tool everyone loves to hate.
I’m coming up to my one year anniversary on Substack. I moved across from Medium in 2025 simply because I longed for an open community of like-minded people who just enjoyed writing about the things they love. And my love, if you didn’t know already, is all things technology.
But quite early on I realised that the topics I enjoy weren’t always welcome here. My tribe was small and not always met with warmth. I hate to say it but there’s a level of literary snobbery and techno-fear on Substack that I hadn’t encountered before, and I’ve since chosen to ignore for my own sanity.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m content with being ignored. I just like to write, and it always surprises me when I find out that someone has actually read my articles. But when I hear something that I understand being blindly reviled by those seemingly jumping on a bandwagon out of fear, I see red. I have the mental image of a crowd of pitchfork waving peasants chasing after Frankenstein’s creature out of pure fear and ignorance.
The most prominent example of this, especially in creative communities, is the rise of AI.
My stance here is very simple. It’s just a tool. Grow up.
At this point let me be clear. I’m not talking about intelligent debate of the environmental impact of AI, or the use of AI in warfare, or even the ethics behind the potential of a sentient AGI. I’m open to these subjects and encourage healthy discussion around them. What I’m talking about is the blind dismissal of the technology as if it’s something offensive that you need to scrape off your shoe. The supercilious banishment of those that are brave enough to admit that they used ChatGPT to bounce an idea around that they had.
To dismiss a technology because you believe it to be inferior to you, is frankly ridiculous. It’s a tool that is designed to help you, not replace you. To blame the technology because you have the quiet fear that it might eventually do something as well as you, makes you look like a child bullying a baby who is learning to walk. To exorcise it like a demon because you believe someone with less creativity than yourself might monetise it, well I’m afraid to say that’s just unadulterated insecurity.
AI is not here for your job and it’s not here to replace you as a creator. If you take a second to learn how you could use it intelligently, then perhaps you could even improve on your own creativity. Ask yourself this, how many times have you checked an online thesaurus, or checked a source on the internet to get a better understanding of a subject whilst writing? How many times have you run a spell check over your work? It’s no different. It’s just a tool. Albeit a million times more advanced.
But let me be clear once again – I get it. I understand why you feel this way.
I would hazard a guess that most people that complain about the rise of AI, are not actually offended by the technology itself (or at least wouldn’t be if they understood it more). What they’re outraged by is the way they’re seeing it being used by early adopting entrepreneurs and advertisers. The flood of AI slop that’s filling up Amazon, Instagram and even Spotify. Poorly written novellas, fake images designed to go viral, AI-written articles with no byline and nothing to say. It’s true that our social media feeds are now clogged with generated content optimised for engagement rather than truth. These exist not because the creator had something to express, but because the barrier to production had dropped and there was money to be made.
Social media is the biggest offender. I’m not someone who mistrusts it - I’ve been on Instagram for years and genuinely enjoy it. And look, I’m not entirely immune to AI generated content either - I actively encourage cat ninjas on my insta feed. I mean, who doesn’t love a cat ninja. But it’s becoming harder to ignore the fact that comment sections have turned into a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and fake news accusations.
It was a relatively safe space until quite recently. Not because I started seeing AI generated content on a daily basis, but because I’ve begun to read disturbing comments distrusting genuine content and encouraging human-created conspiracy theories. Science blogs showing photographs of the recent Artemis mission, are now flooded with comments like “This is AI. Don’t believe it. It’s all fake. We never went to the moon.”
And it’s not just the Artemis mission. I recently saw a short clip of Felix Baumgartner jumping from a platform in Earth’s stratosphere in 2012. An event I remember well as I watched it live with a group of friends in complete awe. In the comments...”This is AI”. The level of dumb has reached a new level.
It infuriates me. Insane conspiracy theories bundled together and sold as fact, simply because a technology has become so good that it occasionally fools you into believing something is real when it’s not. The level of distrust its misuse has created enrages me.
And there’s an erosion of trust in facts that really concerns me. There’s now a whole new generation growing up incapable of trusting what they see with their own eyes. That can’t look at footage of a man jumping from space in 2012 and believe it happened, simply because the internet has taught them that nothing is real. If you argue against it, you get shut down and told that it’s healthy scepticism, but for me it’s turning into something far more corrosive.
I recently saw a comment from a misguided individual who chose to argue in a comments section with a flat earther. They wrote simply “Read a book”. And the worrying but inevitable reply – “Hahaha you don’t trust books do you? How naïve are you?”. It appears that we are now no longer able to believe the entire of written human history because somebody made a video of a cat doing kung fu moves.
My frustrations stem from the misuse and misunderstanding, NOT the technology itself. Don’t be a techno-bigot by dismissing a technology that you could be embracing to better yourself, simply because others choose to use it in offensive and negative ways. If you think that you can ignore it and it will go away, you’re sadly mistaken, so reclaim the technology and make it your own.
Instead of condemning AI, consider what it could be good for. You’ve got a half-formed idea for a piece. You know roughly what you want to say but the shape isn’t there yet. You could use AI to talk it through. The emotionless friend that won’t steal your creative thunder. Use it as a critic that’s always there to bounce off.
The work is still yours. It’s still your voice and your idea. You don’t have moral regret when you use spellcheck, so why should you apologise for bouncing an idea or two around with a knowledgeable data source? I use AI every day, but my ideas are still mine and my prose is as crappy as it’s always been. So what if I use AI to help me edit my ramblings into something more coherent?
“Just because AI helped doesn’t mean AI did everything” sounds obvious when you say it out loud. But the current conversation doesn’t really allow for that nuance. It tends to collapse into a binary - either you used AI and therefore the work isn’t real, or you didn’t and it is. Which is a strange way to think about tools. Nobody questions whether the photographer who edits in Lightroom is being authentic. Or whether the writer who runs their draft past an editor is cheating. Everything you’ve seen or read in the last 30 years has in some way been edited using technology, this really is no different on the surface.
There are genuine concerns worth taking seriously. Bias in the models, ownership questions, companies using AI as cover to cut headcount rather than to genuinely improve their work, environmental waste, the list goes on. Those things need scrutiny. But that’s an entirely different conversation from whether AI has a place in a creative workflow.
Don’t criticise the microwave because the chef used it to dry their socks. Criticise the chef because that’s not what microwaves are for.
This article could have been seriously improved by the use of AI
“Just because AI helped doesn’t mean AI did everything”